Latest / The Difficult Boss Podcast with Fexingo: Managing Up, Toxic Managers, and Workplace Survival / How to Manage a Boss Who Creates a Culture of Blame
Transcript
- Lucas: There is a specific kind of boss who doesn't just blame you when something goes wrong — they build an entire culture around blame. It's the VP who starts every review meeting with 'Okay, whose fault was this?' Luna: Ugh. I've had that. It's like walking into a room where the air is already hostile. Lucas: Right. And it's not just unpleasant — it's expensive. A 2022 study by Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School found that teams in blame-oriented cultures are 30 percent less likely to report errors, which means small problems fester into big ones. Luna: And that also kills innovation. If people are afraid to try anything novel, you get stagnation. Lucas: Exactly. So today we're going to talk about how to survive — and maybe even thrive — under a boss who defaults to blame. I want to start with a concrete case. Luna: Please. Lucas: A friend of mine worked at a mid-sized SaaS company — about 300 employees — under a VP of engineering named Derek. Derek's first instinct when a deadline slipped or a bug hit production was to ask 'Who committed this?' in the group Slack channel. Luna: Public shaming. That's a fast track to a culture of fear. Lucas: It was. Within six months, attrition in his department hit 40 percent. The people who stayed stopped raising their hands when they saw problems. They just quietly worked around them. Luna: So what did your friend do? Did they leave too? Lucas: They considered it. But first they tried a deliberate approach. The key insight from Edmondson's work is that blame and accountability are not the same thing. Blame is backward-looking and personal. Accountability is forward-looking and systemic. Luna: So how do you reframe the conversation when your boss is pointing fingers? Lucas: You use language that shifts the focus from 'who' to 'what'. When Derek started the blame game, my friend would say something like: 'I see the bug. Let's figure out what in our process allowed it to get through. I have a few ideas for the review checklist.' Luna: That's smart — it offers a solution without accepting or assigning blame. Lucas: Right. And the second strategy: document your decisions transparently. In a blame culture, the boss can rewrite history. But if you have a simple shared log — even a Confluence page — where you note the reasoning behind key choices, it's harder for them to scapegoat you. Luna: Doesn't that risk looking defensive, though? Lucas: It can, if you frame it as a CYA move. But if you frame it as 'Hey, I want to make sure we capture our thinking so we can learn from it later,' it's seen as proactive. My friend called it a 'decision journal' and invited the team to contribute. Luna: That's a good example of creating psychological safety in your own sphere — even if your boss doesn't model it. Lucas: Exactly. The third strategy is to create small pockets of psychological safety with your peers. If you and a few teammates agree to admit mistakes openly among yourselves, you build a buffer against the boss's blame. Luna: But doesn't that risk the boss finding out and feeling undermined? Lucas: It can. So you keep it low-key. My friend started a private weekly 'retro' with three teammates — no managers. They spent fifteen minutes talking about what went wrong that week without any finger-pointing. Just learning. Luna: So it's a kind of underground culture of learning. Lucas: Exactly. And what happened? After about three months, Derek noticed that my friend's team had fewer repeated errors than other teams. He actually asked what they were doing differently. Lucas: Yeah. My friend pitched the retro idea as a pilot for the whole engineering org. Derek agreed. It didn't turn him into a saint, but it reduced the public blame sessions by maybe 60 percent. Luna: So the lesson is you can't change your boss's personality, but you can change the patterns around them. Lucas: That's it. And if this episode gave you a useful framework for dealing with a blame-oriented boss, here's the thing: this show stays ad-free because of listeners who chip in. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Even a one-time contribution keeps the coffee flowing and the episodes coming. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to say 'this helped me' and keep the resource available for others. Lucas: So back to the main thread. One more thing my friend did that I think is underused: they explicitly asked for what Edmondson calls 'framing the work as a learning problem.' In one one-on-one, my friend said to Derek: 'I think we both want to ship quality code. Can we agree that when something fails, our first question is "What can we learn?" instead of "Who dropped the ball?"' Luna: And how did Derek respond? Lucas: He paused. Then he said 'I guess that makes sense.' He didn't change overnight, but my friend noticed he stopped using the word 'blame' in team meetings for about a week. Luna: Progress. Incremental. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the realistic outcome here. You're not going to reform a toxic boss in one conversation. But you can carve out a space where you and your team can do good work despite them. Luna: I think the big takeaway for me is: don't absorb the blame culture. Build an alternative, even if it's small. Lucas: Yeah. Because in the long run, the people who learn from mistakes outperform the people who hide them. And that's a truth even a blame-culture boss can't argue with.